Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (24 page)

“Hughes had the book as a sort of skeleton—with an incest theme. I didn’t know what it was with Hughes and incest. So I wrote a whole script, and after I finished it, Hughes set a starting date. But Hawks didn’t like my script. So they brought Ben Hecht in ten days before shooting.… I think Hecht was responsible for
getting that picture made. He tightened it all up. He was an absolute pro, when he wanted to be. And he managed to tell the story, such as it was.”

Burnett’s figures of twelve scripts and ten days before shooting are exaggerations. But when Hawks and Hecht went to work they set about altering the basic story line, dropping the two brothers angle, working in the Borgias approach, borrowing liberally
from
Underworld
(especially the triangular relationship and the trapped couple gunning it out with police at the end), and generally patterning the rise of their hero, Tony “Scarface” Camonte, on the most famous man in America, Al Capone. Hecht had met Capone and, as Hawks pointed out, “he knew a lot about Chicago so he didn’t do any research.” Mahin added that, despite all the other names on
the screenplay, “the basic story was Ben’s. Without his material there was nothing because I saw some of the stuff Hughes had.”

During this intense period, Hecht wrote to his wife back East of
Scarface
that, “I’m doing it as homework when I’m not with Goldwyn.… Hughes is out of his mind with delight over my first days work on
Scarface
. Says it is more than four authors did for him in two months
time. Hawks, the director and a charming gent, a hero aviator is pleased.” As for the payment in daily, messengered thousand-dollar bills, it was carried out as advertised, although Hecht, having received a great deal from the young tycoon for
The Front Page
, knew better than to suspect that Hughes wouldn’t be good for the money due him. Rather, the whole thing was a publicity stunt concocted
by Hecht and his film agent, Myron Selznick, to further Hecht’s legend as the most prolific and highest-paid writer in Hollywood.

Hawks always boasted of having consulted with real mobsters while preparing the film, although his claims on this score are suspect because of his dubious insistence that Capone himself loved the film and owned a personal print; by the time the picture was released,
the gangster was behind bars. More believable is Hecht’s story of having been visited by a couple of Capone goons who threateningly demanded to know who this Howard Hughes was who thought he could make a film about their boss. Hughes, Hecht assured them, was “just the sucker with the money” and in no way posed a danger to their boss.

Still, even Ben Hecht couldn’t write a brilliant and fully
dialogued screenplay in just eleven days, which is how long Hawks said it took. (Mahin claimed it was fourteen days, but the discrepancy might have stemmed from the conditions of Hecht’s contract with Hughes, which stipulated that the writer was to receive a thousand dollars a day for a maximum of fourteen days; if he worked any period beyond that, he had a salary ceiling of fifteen thousand dollars,
which answers the critics who have always wondered why he didn’t drag out his writing schedule.) What Hecht produced during this
period was a detailed sixty-page treatment, whereupon he booked his return trip to New York, telling Mahin, “Now you’ve got to fix it up.” The novice Mahin felt the text was great as it was, but Hecht said, “It’s so full of holes, this thing, John. There’s hardly any
dialogue. This isn’t a script, this is a full treatment. You’re going to have trouble, but this is your job that we promised you.”

Finding Hecht’s work “brilliant” but knowing better than Mahin how much work remained to be done on the script, Hawks hired his trusted collaborator and fix-it man, Seton Miller, to help Mahin out during the month of March for six hundred dollars a week. “Seton put
all the numbers down, and I just redid the dialogue,” Mahin recalled. “We did the final script with Hawks. We started from page one, redoing the dialogue.” Miller and Mahin would work in intense sessions with Hawks, hammering out ideas for dialogue based on Hecht’s scene structure, then set it down on paper on their own.

Even this wasn’t enough, however. Angry, according to Hawks, that he hadn’t
milked as much as he might have from Hughes, Hecht, after his next trip to the Coast, arranged to travel with Hawks back to New York, where the director was headed to search for actors. The writer spent much of the trip honing and polishing the script in league with the director, the work interspersed with sessions of backgammon, which Hawks didn’t yet really know how to play. In the end, according
to Hawks, Hecht put twenty days into the writing of
Scarface
and received his deserved amount of money, although it’s unclear whether the remainder was paid legitimately or by Hawks as a gambling debt.

As a rule, the major studios were unwilling to loan any of their important players to the upstart Hughes, which limited the field considerably. Although Hawks said that his friend Irving Thalberg
tried to push a young MGM contract player named Clark Gable on him for the title role, Hawks didn’t think he would do. “I’d seen his first picture, and I turned him down. We needed a fantastic
actor
, not just a personality. Nothing wrong with a personality; the camera likes certain people and turns them into something special and wonderful. But we needed
actor
actors, and I told Hughes I’d go
to New York and look for some.”

Given Hecht’s vast knowledge of the New York theater scene, it is highly probable that he gave Hawks plenty of suggestions on who and what to see while in town. He undoubtedly recommended that Hawks look up Osgood Perkins (Tony’s father), since the actor had originated the role of Walter Burns in
The Front Page
. Hawks felt immediately that he would be
good as the
selfish but ultimately weak gang leader Johnny Lovo, who gets rubbed out by his lieutenant, Scarface. “I always had the theory that heavies had beady eyes,” Hawks remarked, “and Osgood certainly had them.”

As for Paul Muni, Hawks was hardly an aficionado of the Yiddish theater scene, and Hecht’s claims that he was responsible for Muni winning the lead seem plausible. At the very least, he probably
brought him to Hawks’s attention. At the time, Muni was back in New York after a disappointing first stab at Hollywood in
The Valiant
and
Seven Faces
in 1929, convinced that his future lay on the stage, not in pictures. Hawks claimed, “I remembered seeing him in the Yiddish theater in a fine scene with his back to the camera [sic], where he was such a purist he’d even made up his hands to fit
the character.” Another time Hawks said, “I saw Muni in a Jewish theater on 39th Street playing an old, old man.” As it happens, Muni was not appearing on any stage at the time of Hawks’s visit, but the director paid a call on him anyway. “He was very pleasant and smiled but said he couldn’t play that kind of man, he wasn’t that kind of person, he wasn’t physically strong enough,” Hawks explained.
“Besides he protested that Cagney had made
Public Enemy
, and Robinson had made
Little Caesar
. What more could be done in
Scarface
that hadn’t already been done?”

Hawks challenged Muni to make a test, and Muni’s wife, Bella, who found Hawks “charming and persuasive” and had great influence over her husband, helped talk him into it. While Hecht brought the actor up to his home in Nyack, where he
“taught him how to throw a right hook punch to the belly, so he would seem like a fighter,” Hawks prepared to shoot the test in late April. He rented a tiny studio, designed a padded suit that would give the actor more bulk, hired other actors who were shorter than Muni, and even decided to put him on raised boards to increase his stature.

The results of the silent test, in addition to his favorable
opinion of the script and his faith in Hawks, convinced Muni to take the part. Hughes requested further tests, and while Jerome Lawrence, in his biography of Muni, stated that no further tests were done,
Variety
reported on May 17 that Hawks was finally leaving New York “after making further Muni tests.” As for salary, Hughes offered the actor $20,000, but Muni held out for $27,500 and began reading
and learning everything he could about Capone.

Once back in Los Angeles, Hawks quickly cast the other important roles. The story goes that Hawks noticed George Raft in the audience at a prizefight at a time when “he was carrying a gun for the gangs.” Actually, the former New York dancer and gigolo had already appeared in three films,
including Rowland Brown’s excellent
Quick Millions
at Fox,
which Hawks had seen. Raft said that Jules Furthman sent him to see Hawks. At the time, Raft was due to go to Florida to join his former boss, the gangster Owney Madden, on tour with the Primo Carnera boxing carnival, so Hawks, who sensed that Raft’s “unique look” and “marvelous impassive quality” would make him ideal as Scarface’s bodyguard and best friend, Gino Rinaldi, a role modeled on Capone’s
bodyguard Frank Rio, signed him up at once, with Raft proposing to do it for a mere five hundred dollars. Hawks later hiked the amount when Raft ended up working more than fifty days.

To celebrate, Raft went to a popular industry restaurant where Paul Muni happened to be dining. Muni noticed Raft, asked him to join him at his table, and soon told him he’d be perfect for a role in the new gangster
picture he’d come out to do. “That’s really funny of you to say that,” Raft replied. “I just saw Mr. Hawks and got the job.” Muni and Raft became close during the shoot, with the highly trained thespian giving the novice more than a few acting tips.

Raft was responsible for bringing Ann Dvorak into the picture. Raft brought the slender, eighteen-year-old chorus girl to an elegant party at Hawks’s
home. Hawks recalled that “Ann asked [Raft] to dance with her but he said he’d rather not. She was a little high and right in front of him starts to do this sexy undulating dance, sort of trying to lure him on to dance with her. She was a knockout. She wore a black silk gown almost cut down to her hips. I’m sure that’s all she had on. After a while George couldn’t resist her suggestive dance
and in no time they were doing a sensational number which stopped the party.”

The evening proved fateful on a number of fronts. The next day, Hawks called Dvorak in to see him, and after working out a deal with Eddie Mannix to release her from her contract at MGM, where she was languishing on the vine, he cast her in the key role of Cesca, the sister Scarface loves who becomes involved with Raft’s
Gino. So big an impression had Dvorak’s dance made on Hawks that he had her repeat it in the film, in the key nightclub scene in which Cesca tempts Gino onto the dance floor, marking the beginning of their passionate but doomed romance. For Hawks, “the scene played like a million dollars because it was something that really happened between George and Ann.”

It was also the beginning of something
happening between Howard and Ann. Lean and sharp-featured, very much to Hawks’s taste, Dvorak soon became the director’s after-hours companion in a liaison that lasted through
Scarface
and into their next picture together,
The Crowd Roars
. Hawks liked
Dvorak’s sprightly, direct, unbashful manner, and she was one of the few actresses he ever used in two films.

The other sexual crosscurrent on
the
Scarface
company was an uncomfortable one involving Raft and Hughes. Raft had known Billie Dove in the late 1920s, when she was going out with New York Mayor Jimmy Walker. They met again during the
Scarface
shoot, and Raft, who claimed ignorance of Dove’s involvement with his boss, decided to push the relationship to a new level. Suspicious of what was going on, Hughes traced the couple to
the Ambassador Hotel. A hoodlum pal of Raft’s noticed Hughes in the lobby and called the actor upstairs, who was right in the middle of things with Billie Dove at that moment. “She was pretty upset when I told her what was happening, since the last guy in the world either of us wanted to cross was Howard Hughes. So, as gracefully as I could, I said my good-byes to Billie, slipped down the service
elevator, and beat it home.”

Karen Morley won the role of Johnny Lovo’s blond moll whose choice in men shifts with the winds of power. Boris Karloff, the big-house killer in
The Criminal Code
, pressed Hawks for a role and got the similarly sinister part of Scarface’s crosstown rival, Gaffney. To play Scarface’s goofy personal secretary, Hawks resourcefully selected Vince Barnett, who had played
a few bits before but who, along with his father, also worked as a professional ribber, or cutup, at parties and official functions. Expert at posing as a waiter and spilling things on people, or getting up and insulting bigwigs in front of their peers, Barnett, with his bald pate, out-turned ears, and childlike expression, had become too familiar a face to get away with this stuff anymore. So
Hawks, by giving him his first important role, launched his career as a successful character actor. In all, the cast was a bargain, with only stage veterans Muni and Perkins earning anything resembling real money and everyone grateful for the break.

By the time Ben Hecht was finished with his contributions to the script of
Scarface
, the story was much harsher, more cynical about human motivations
and behavior, more jaundiced about political realities, and more forthright than the finished film would be.
Scarface
would still emerge as the most potent film about organized crime Hollywood would produce for decades, and even the diluted version went well beyond the contemporary norm in violence. The story of what happened to the content of
Scarface
between June 1, 1931, a month before shooting
started, and its openings—in different versions in various parts of the country—the following April and May illustrates the vagaries of censorship laws in the U.S. at the time and
specifically demonstrates how pressures could be brought to bear on producers during what is now considered the racy pre-Code era in Hollywood. The tale plays out as a pitched battle among the wills of some fiercely
independent filmmakers, the financial priorities of businessmen, the righteous dander of the press, and the intrigues of politicians and officials with personal agendas of their own, which in some cases involved the neutralizing of Howard Hughes as a force in Hollywood.